The Bush Doctrine: What the President Said and What It Means

Helle C.
Dale:I'd like to mention
that our event today is made possible by a generous contribution
from Douglas and Sarah Allison, longtime supporters of The Heritage
Foundation who have an abiding interest in public policy and who
are taking a special role in promoting its research and education
pro­grams in dealing with international relations. We're most
grateful for them today and happy to have them as our
guests.

Following the
President's soaring Inaugural speech, intense debate broke out here
and abroad regarding his rhetoric and intentions. How can the
Administra­tion match its ambitions properly with the
priorities of national interest and security? How will this
doc­trine affect tyrants and less than democratic allies of the
United States? How will it be sold to our foreign allies, some of
whom are already skeptical of Ameri­can intentions, yet
indispensable for this ambitious endeavor? We have with us today
four distinguished commentators to analyze this vital foreign
policy.

Norman Podhoretz, our
first speaker, served as edi­tor in chief of Commentary
from 1960 to 1995 and is now editor at large. I want to commend to
you an arti­cle in February's issue of Commentary, "The
War Against World War IV," which is in part very much about the
topic we're discussing today. Mr. Podhoretz was Pulitzer scholar at
Columbia University and holds degrees from Cambridge University,
England, and the Jewish Theological Seminary. A longtime member of
the Council on Foreign Relations and a former chairman of the New
Directions Advisory Committee, Mr. Podhoretz was also one of the
founders of the Committee on the Present Danger and the Committee
for the Free World.

Mr. Podhoretz is the
author of 10 books and hundreds of articles in most of the major
American periodicals and other countries' as well. He has
lec­tured at many universities and before many civil rights and
religious groups and appears frequently on radio and television. In
addition to his numer­ous other awards, in 2004 he was
presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's
highest civilian honor.

The Honorable Peter
Wehner is director of the White House Office of Strategic
Initiatives and Deputy Assistant to the President. Prior to this
position, Mr. Wehner was Deputy Director of Pres­idential
Speech Writing. Before joining the Bush Administration,
Mr. Wehner was Executive Direc­tor for Policy at Empower
America, a conservative public policy organization, and he also
worked on the cultural studies project for The Heritage
Foun­dation. He has specialized in and has written
exten­sively on political, cultural, and religious issues,
including seven books and numerous articles.

Mr. Wehner was an
assistant to William Bennett at the Office of National Drug Control
Policy dur­ing the Administration of George H. W. Bush. He was
a speechwriter at the Department of Education during the Reagan
Administration and, prior to his days at the Department of
Education, worked at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies and later at the Hudson Institute and the Ethics and Public
Policy Center.

John Sullivan has been
executive director of the Center for International Private
Enterprise, an affil­iate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
since 1991. In 1983, he was associate director of the bipartisan
democracy program that created the National Endowment for
Democracy. Once the endowment was established, Mr. Sullivan
returned to the Chamber to help create the Center for International
Private Enterprise, where he served as program director. He has a
Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Pittsburgh
and is the author of numerous articles and publications on the
tran­sition to democracy in Central and Eastern Europe,
corporate governance, and market-oriented demo­cratic
development.

Last, but not least,
Larry Wortzel is vice presi­dent (for one more day) of The
Heritage Founda­tion and director of the Kathryn and Shelby
Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies. He has served in
the Marine Corps and the Army. He has collected communications
intelligence in the Army Security Agency and served as a
counter­intelligence officer and foreign intelligence
collec­tor for the Army Intelligence and Security Command. He
served two tours of duty as a mili­tary attaché in the
American Embassy in China for the Defense Intelligence Agency and
was there in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square massacre and had a
very important role to play for the Americans on that
occasion.

Larry also served as a
strategist on the Depart­ment of Army Staff and was director of
the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. He
retired from the Army as a colonel in 1999, after 32 years of
service. He's also a member of the congres­sionally mandated
U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was
appoint­ed by House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Helle C.
Dale is Director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison
Center for Foreign Policy Studies, a divi­sion of the Kathryn
and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The
Heritage Foundation.

Norman
Podhoretz:I believe Bush's second
Inaugural was one of the great presidential utteranc­es of our
time and, possibly, of all of American his­tory. I started my
career as a literary critic, and I sometimes don that hat again;
and in that capacity, I want to say that those who were sour about
the sec­ond Inaugural, though some of them are
profession­al writers, seem to me, in this instance at least,
to have developed a tin ear for English prose. They were deaf to
the exquisite rhetorical flourishes that never exceeded the bounds
of the best literary taste. They were unable to hear the rhythmical
sureness of the language and the beauty of the cadences.

Let me just read a
couple of sentences in which the President played with the image of
fire: "After the shipwreck of Communism came years of rela­tive
quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical"- note, in passing, the
vividly evocative phrase "years of sabbatical"-"and then there came
a day of fire."

I'd like to find
anything in the speeches of John F. Kennedy, so often praised for
their great eloquence, that can match that short sentence. And the
Presi­dent picked up the image of fire again later in the
speech: "By our efforts"-he meant, of course, our efforts in what I
have been calling World War IV- "we have lit a fire as well-a fire
in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns
those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of
freedom will reach the darkest cor­ners of our
world."

It's not quite Lincoln,
but it's not all that far from Lincoln either, and I think people
who complained against this speech in print will someday be ashamed
of themselves for execrably bad judg­ment. They also were
guilty-and I'm talking here about friends and political allies-of
wildly distort­ed characterizations. To everyone's amazement,
for example, Peggy Noonan complained that there was too much God in
this speech, but the fact of the matter is that it contained fewer
references to God than most presidential utterances. I counted
some­thing like four, and I suspect that if you looked at
Lincoln's second Inaugural, the greatest speech ever made in the
history of this country, you would find three times as
many.

But there was one
criticism that has to be taken seriously, and that was the point
made by many critics, including supporters of the President, that
he was overreaching, stating goals that are far too ambitious in
language that was far too universalist, raising hopes and
aspirations that neither the Unit­ed States nor any other
mortal power could possi­bly hope to fulfill.

This is the same kind
of criticism, incidentally, that Walter Lippmann made against Harry
Truman when Truman proclaimed his doctrine, and similar things were
said about John F. Kennedy's first Inau­gural. But I would
argue that the second Inaugural of George W. Bush no more
overreached than Fran­klin Delano Roosevelt's promise to bring
the Four Freedoms to the world, including freedom from want and
freedom from fear. Think about it: He was going to make us all free
from fear. It certainly didn't overreach Truman's promise to
support "free peoples" everywhere, and neither did it overreach
John F. Kennedy's famous statement that we would "pay any price,
bear any burden, meet any hard­ship, support any friend, oppose
any foe, to assure the survival and the success of
liberty."

There are echoes of all
these speeches in Bush's second Inaugural, and they are used to
brilliant effect. One could do a careful explication de
texte and tease out some of the allusions which link this
speech to some of the greater utterances and nobler moments in our
history-and which make it, inci­dentally, entirely bipartisan
in spirit.

I would even go so far
as to say that not only did the President not overreach, but he was
actually rather modest. Qualifications were introduced-not the kind
of defensive qualifications that weaken an assertion, but the kind
that, to use the word that became notorious during the presidential
campaign, bring nuance to large generalizations. He said that we
were not intending to impose our system of gov­ernment on
others. He said that what we were trying to do-namely, to spread
liberty throughout as much of the world as possible-was not
primarily a task of arms, and he also said that it would not be the
work of a moment or a year, but the work of gener­ations. So
there was a due note of prudence, caution, modesty that served not
as a damper to the soaring rhetoric, but as something of an
anchor.

But the question still
arises, the first question that Helle posed to us, "How do we match
this soaring rhetoric, this great ambition with national security
and national interest considerations?"

I don't think that's so
difficult a question: Ideal­ism does not preclude prudential
judgment in its implementation. The sharp division between
ideal­ism and realism is useful for polemical purposes, but
there is no absolute ideal and no absolute real. There may be
absolute Realpolitik in world affairs, but not in American
foreign policy; nor has there ever been an absolute pursuit of the
ideal. Not even Woodrow Wilson, who was notoriously thought of as
being the most naïve or utopian of American ide­alists,
was blind to considerations of national inter­est. But
prudential judgment means picking your shots, knowing what the
right moment is to go after your targets and by what
means-military, eco­nomic pressure, political pressure, even
sometimes the charade of negotiations.

George Bush was
denounced all over the world, including in this country, as having
rushed to war in Iraq. Actually, I thought he dawdled for eight
months with the U.N. Anyhow, we now see him playing what I hope
will turn out to be the same game in relation to Iran. To those who
think that Iran can be prevented by negotiations from
devel­oping nuclear weapons, he's saying, "Okay, I'm going to
give you your chance to show me that you're right in believing that
there's an alternative to force in this case. Show me that we can
handle this problem-that you agree is a problem, just as everyone
did about Saddam Hussein, and that you also agree must be resolved.
Show me that it can be resolved through negotiations. If so, fine.
If not, we may have no other choice than military force." If I read
this President right, he's doing again what he did in the run-up to
the invasion of Iraq.

But what about the
universalism of the Presi­dent's rhetoric? How, for instance,
does it square with the praise he has lavished on Vladimir Putin
despite Putin's reversal of the progress that had been made in
Russia toward democratization?

My answer is that
everyone knows, or should know, that the universalism of the Bush
Doctrine, while absolutely sincere and valid in the long run, has
one main target in the short run. And that tar­get is the
despotisms of the Middle East, just as in the Cold War-World War
III, as I have come to call it-the Communists were the main target
and not other despots.

When Harry Truman
promised to help "free peo­ples" everywhere and John F. Kennedy
spoke of sup­porting "any friend" and opposing "any foe,"
everybody knew they were both talking about hold­ing back the
tide of Soviet expansionism and keep­ing the spread of
Communism in check. They were not talking about dislodging every
tyrant and every dictator on the face of the Earth. This would have
been a utopian and, indeed, a silly enterprise. There is such a
thing as one step at a time, and that too is an element of
prudential judgment. So the Communists were the main target in
World War III and the Fas­cists in World II; in fact, in
fighting the Nazi regime, prudential judgment dictated that we even
ally our­selves with the Soviet Union-a nation that was as bad
politically and morally as the Nazi regime itself.

This does not mean that
there won't be spillover effects from the narrow casting or narrow
targeting of the Bush Doctrine. Thus, the "Orange Revolu­tion"
in Ukraine was surely a direct result of the enunciation of the
Bush Doctrine, and not only its enunciation, but the President's
demonstration in Afghanistan and Iraq that he is willing and able
to put his money where his mouth is.

But what happened
in Ukraine and what may happen in other places outside the targeted
region is icing on the cake-a bonus. If you want to put the Bush
Doctrine's objective in national security terms that also take
account of its universalist professions, you might say that we are,
under George W. Bush's leadership, trying to make the Middle East
safe for America by making it safe for democracy. You might say
it's the foreign policy form of doing well by doing good. We are
serving our interests and simulta­neously pursuing what most of
us, I'm sure, recog­nize as a noble cause and that I think will
eventually be recognized by many other people as such.

Take a look at what's
been happening since the election in Iraq on January 30. Already,
many peo­ple, including a real enemy of the United States in
the past, Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader in Leba­non, along
with a writer for Der Spiegel in Germany and some others,
have begun to make comparisons with the fall of the Berlin
Wall.

People laughed at
Ronald Reagan when he said, "Tear down this wall," and we know what
hap­pened very shortly thereafter. They laughed at Bush too,
and the author of the article in Der Spiegel now says that
maybe it's time to stop laughing. We're hearing this kind of thing
everywhere in response to the demonstrations against the Syrian
occupa­tion of Lebanon, which are going on as we speak and
which resulted in the resignation of the pro-Syrian puppet prime
minister.

I got an e‑mail
this very morning from a friend in Israel who wrote to tell me how
astonished he was to see the leading afternoon paper in Israel,
Ma'ariv, describe what's happening in Lebanon as a victory
for George W. Bush. Because the media in Israel are even more
liberal than the mainstream media in the United States, my friend
never thought he'd live to see the day when a leading Israeli
newspaper would have a good word to say for George Bush. This in
itself is a kind of cultural revolution brought about by the Bush
Doctrine.

Finally, a quick word
about the prospects for the Bush Doctrine. My view is that if the
President con­tinues pursuing it with the same determination,
stamina, courage, and resoluteness he has shown up to now, it will
continue to succeed and, by being successful, will win the hearts
and minds of reluc­tant allies and even enemies. This is the
lesson of the election in Iraq. I have to confess that I had not
expected that election to have as rapidly benevo­lent an effect
on the climate of opinion as it is prov­ing to have. I thought
it would be dismissed the way the election in Afghanistan
was.

Of course, although
Bush has been credited by some who begin to see the light, others,
like Tho­mas Friedman, the most overrated columnist in the
world, have actually made it seem as though the wonderful things
that have been happening in the Greater Middle East have occurred
not because of Bush but in spite of him-as though the only role
Bush has played in this extraordinary series of events is to do
everything in his power to prevent it and screw it up. Shame on
them all.

I'll end by reiterating
the sentiment with which I began. We have been privileged to be
present at one of the greatest speeches ever made by an
Amer­ican President, and we have been privileged to
par­ticipate, to whatever extent is in our power, in one of the
noblest enterprises ever undertaken by the United States. For this,
I for one am very grateful, and I think everyone else should be as
well.

Peter
Wehner:I'm grateful to The
Heritage Foundation for devoting this event to examining the second
Inaugural address of President Bush. I say that because it is, in
my judgment, the most philosophically significant Inaugural address
in generations, and it is perhaps the single most important speech
in understanding the belief sys­tem of America's 43rd
President.

What I'd like to do is
state some common criti­cisms of the Inaugural address and
answer them in a way that I hope is useful and intellectually
fair-minded and, most important of all, brief.

Criticism number
oneis
that immediately follow­ing the Inaugural address, the White
House began to back away from it. The President's "lieutenants," it
was said, are out there "spinning that all those lovely words
didn't mean quite as much as they seemed to have meant." Now, that
may be the wish of the President's critics, but if wishes were
horses, beggars would ride, and by now people should know that this
President says what he means and acts on what he says.

President Bush knew
exactly what he intended to say in his Inaugural address. The idea
of what the Inaugural address was going to be was his, and he was
intimately involved in every stage of the process, and neither he
nor the White House is backing away a single inch from his words.
And there is a good reason for that: President Bush believes them
deep in his bones.

It is true that in the
days after the speech, White House aides simply had to reiterate
the words that were in the Inaugural address, since so much of it
was overlooked in the post-speech commentary. Sometimes it's
necessary to respond to caricatures and sloppy characterizations,
but there's a crucial difference between backing away from a speech
and actually urging its critics to read the words of the
speech.

Criticism number
twois
that the speech was far too sweeping in its goals. It was said that
the White House is suffering from "mission inebriation." The speech
included no "moral modesty," lacked "nuance," and so forth and so
on. To which I would respond: The speech refutes the criticism, and
the President's Inaugural address was far more nuanced than many of
the criticisms that were leveled against it.

For example, President
Bush spoke about the "ultimate" goal of ending tyranny in our
world. Per­haps it is necessary to point out to our critics
that "ultimate" is not a synonym for "immediate." "Ulti­mate"
isn't even a synonym for "in the next four years." Ultimate means
eventual.

Ending tyranny in our
world, then, is a goal that will take time. President Bush, as
Norman said, called it the "concentrated work of generations." And
if some of the critics of the President believe the goal of
American foreign policy should be to accommodate itself to tyranny,
let them say so- loudly, clearly, publicly, and
repeatedly.

It's worth adding that
world events are confirming the President's confidence in liberty.
During the last four decades, we have witnessed the most
spectacu­lar growth of freedom in history, and in less than
four months, we have seen elections take place in Afghan­istan,
Ukraine, among the Palestinian people, and in Iraq. In a span of
113 days, more than 100 million people living on two continents
have cast free votes for the first time in nations that had never
known true democracy. More than half of these voters are people of
the Muslim faith who live in the broader Middle East. And in just
the last few days, we've seen extraordinary developments in
Lebanon-massive popular demonstrations in Martyrs' Square in
Beirut-and encouraging events in Egypt as well.

For those who remain
skeptical of the appeal of liberty and its capacity to take root in
foreign soil, it is worth recalling a line from philosophy: You can
prove the possible by the actual. Unfolding before our eyes are
historical and enormously hopeful achievements. We are witnessing a
great movement toward human freedom.

Criticism number
threeis that President
Bush's speech is committing him to an
"unending…con­flict." It is said that the President has
asserted a right to intervene in the internal affairs of "every
nation on earth, and that is, quite simply, a recipe for endless
war." The response to this criticism is a simple one: Read the
speech. The President said that the goal of ending tyranny in our
world "is not primarily the task of arms," though he did say we
will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when
necessary.

The President also said
this, "We will encourage reform in other governments by making
clear that success in our relations will require the decent
treatment of their own people." To argue that this statement is a
manifesto for endless war is wildly wrong. It ignores that there is
a large continuum between doing nothing on the one hand and
invad­ing country after country on the other.

I also would ask this
of the critics: Is the argu­ment that the United States should
be utterly indif­ferent if a leader is massacring his own
people on a massive scale? Don't we want success in our
rela­tions with other nations to depend, at least in part, on
the decent treatment of their own people? Both the moral good and
our national interest argue that they should.

Criticism number
fouris that the speech was
"hopelessly vague" and "without a time frame." It was "more
aspirational than practical," and it didn't provide "practical
wisdom" on how to attain free­dom in a "complex world." In
response, I would point out that every successful Inaugural address
in history has been aspirational. That's the nature of such
speeches, and it's why Inaugural addresses are followed up by
something called State of the Union addresses, which give the aims
enunciated in Inau­gural addresses priority and
direction.

The goal of the Bush
Doctrine is to advance lib­erty, but the means to the end will
vary. Is it really necessary to point out that the government of
the United States will use different tactics with an ally that is
taking steps toward democracy than it will with a totalitarian
enemy that's taking steps with aggression? Unfortunately, perhaps
it is necessary.

President Bush is an
idealistic man, but he's also a practical man. He'll use the best
tools America has to advance liberty. But that doesn't mean we
should apply the same strategies to every nation under the sun, or
that we'll demand everything be done all at once. Different
circumstances require different approaches, but the President's
policy aims for the same end: advancing human freedom.

When Ronald Reagan said
that the march of free­dom would leave Marxism-Leninism on the
"ash-heap of history," he didn't provide a detailed, multi-year,
country-by-country blueprint on how he would achieve this great
goal. It would have been impossible for him to do in any event,
since Presi­dent Reagan understood that he'd have to deal with
issues as they arose. His goal was to set forth an honorable
objective to guide specific policies. Pres­ident Reagan did
exactly that-and, in fact, seven years after his Westminster
speech, Soviet Commu­nism was left on the ash-heap of
history.

Criticism number
fiveis that the President's
speech was too "aggressive," too "hubristic," and "smacks of
imperialism." That charge wilts when you actually read the speech.
Here is what the Pres­ident said:

Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by
citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of
minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the
institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very
different from our own. America will not impose our own style of
government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others
find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own
way.

This statement is
almost the antithesis of imperi­alism. In all of history, has
any predominant nation ever been as careful with its words or as
respectful of other nations and cultures? Charles Krautham­mer
has written, "America is the first hegemonic power in history to be
obsessed with 'exit strate­gies.'" America's goal is not to
invade other coun­tries; it is to allow freedom to take root in
them. That is a noble goal, not an arrogant one, and it's very much
in our national security interests.

A few weeks ago, during
a speech in Davos, Switzerland, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
said this about President Bush's Inaugural address and his
commitment to spread liberty and end tyranny:

Leave aside, for a moment, the odd insist-ence by some
commentators that such a plea is evidence of the "neo-conservative"
grip on Washington-I thought progressives were all in favour of
freedom rather than tyranny.

Prime Minister Blair
said this in an interview: "I thought [democracy] was what we used
to be in favor of on the progressive center-left." Once upon a
time, it was, but those days of passionate advoca­cy are gone
with the wind. As during the Reagan years, today it is
conservatism, this time under the determined leadership of George
Walker Bush, that has seized the mantle of idealism. Conservatives
are strong on defense, and they are strong on defend­ing
America's deepest ideals. The dividing wall that once separated
American interests and American idealism is being torn
down.

This will, I believe,
have political benefits down the road. As a general proposition,
for a political party, optimism is better than pessimism;
achieve­ment is better than obstructionism; and shaping history
is more fulfilling than trying to impede it.

But the political
benefits pale in comparison with the human good that is being done.
To see the joy etched on the faces of newly liberated people is a
vivid reminder that political acts have profound human consequences
and that to be on the side of freedom is to be on the side of the
angels. Many hands and hearts have helped make the gripping and
vivifying events of the last few months possi­ble. But in my
estimation, one set of hands and one stout heart deserve credit
above all the others, and I suspect that when the history of our
times is writ­ten, a man from Crawford, Texas, will have earned
the title as one of history's great liberators.

John
Sullivan:President Bush's
emphasis on freedom and liberty, as both speakers have
men­tioned, runs throughout the Inaugural address and thereby
places support for freedom and liber­ty worldwide at the center
of American foreign policy.

Many have interpreted
this to mean solely the advancement of political freedom through
the development of democratic institutions, such as elections.
While I would surely agree that political freedom is essential, it
seems to me that economic freedom must also be seen as essential
for the attainment of stable democratic societies and for the
accomplishment of this vision.

In a way, we find this
latter emphasis on eco­nomic freedom more well-developed in the
second half of the President's speech. He talks to the
Amer­ican people in that second part of this speech, and he
speaks of building an ownership society as the embodiment of
liberty.

I couldn't agree more
with that emphasis. Presi­dent Bush's words to the American
people are:

In America's ideal of freedom, citizens find the
dignity and security of economic independence instead of laboring
on the edge of subsistence. This is the broader definition of
liberty that motivated the Homestead Act, the Social Security Act,
the GI Bill of Rights.

That same spirit needs
to be recalled as we read the first part of the President's
address. I say that because in recent years, many scholars and, I
regret to say, many of those who design and imple­ment American
foreign policy and foreign aid have confused economic development
with economic freedom.

Economic development is
surely a good end, yet it is often pursued through big government
and with the unintended consequences-or sometimes the intended
consequence-of the repression of economic freedom. Societies which
have adopted the approach of creating economic freedom through
private property, rule of law, and other key institutions are
building economic growth through and on the basis of freedom and
liberty.

For many years, we at
the Center for Internation­al Private Enterprise, our friends
at Heritage, and others have worked with Hernando DeSoto, the
well-known economist from Peru. Hernando's message is simple: As
long as 30 to 50 percent of the people of the developing countries
are locked out of the political and economic systems through walls
of red tape, they are denied the economic freedom needed to build
their lives. In my view, that is at the heart of what we need to
address to accomplish a vision of liberty.

The same point is made
over and over again in the Heritage Index of Economic
Freedom. I recom­mend it highly. The concepts that are
listed here are at the heart of the programs that we're supporting
at CIPE in places like Russia, where liberty is undergoing a
dangerous erosion, as are property rights and other fundamental
economic and politi­cal freedoms.

Turning to the
practical aspect of all of this, I have to say that, all too often,
a grand vision such as President Bush's call for freedom and
liberty remains only a grand vision in the day‑to-day work of
foreign policy and foreign assistance programs. I'm speaking of our
instrumentalities-the State Department, the U.S. Agency for
International Development, and other agencies.

That would be a
tragedy, for understood in its entirety, this vision does
constitute a departure from business as usual. There is one bright
spot that the Bush Administration has put forward, that the
President's speech very much addressed, and that is the Millennium
Challenge Account. It com­bines all of the various themes I've
talked about above, political as well as economic, ruling justly as
well as economic freedom. In fact, the Heritage Index is
embedded in that.

However, more will need
to be done. Let me just make two quick suggestions. First, within
USAID, our development agency, there needs to be a "rethink" of
their democracy-support programs, which tend to be based solely on
political institu­tions and good governance. Economics is
separated into a different part of the bureaucracy and is
main­ly thought of as economic development, not build­ing
the institutions of economic freedom.

This needs to be
rethought. At the policy level, there is understanding at this
point, but the machinery is built in such a way as to confound
policy. In fact, they have a name for it within the governmental
agencies. They call it silos or stove­pipes: From top to
bottom, they never touch.

A second and final
suggestion is that we need to revive a public diplomacy program.
Time is too restricted to describe all that that entails. Let me
just say that when we had a meeting in our office in Afghanistan to
discuss the Inaugural speech, our Afghan staff and Afghan
entrepreneurs, journalists, and women's groups all thought it was
wonderful. These criticisms were not even thought about. They were
focused, really, on the vision. However, what they said was, "We
really don't know how to make this work."

Our foreign assistance
program does try, to some extent, to build understanding of values
and insti­tutions, but it lacks the capacity that we used to
have in the public diplomacy unit, when we had USIA and other
instruments. Some of those are still around like the Voice of
America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty, but the resources
don't begin to meet the magnitude of the challenge. We need to
rebuild it, and we need to rebuild it quite apart from other
equally important efforts to pro­mote American foreign policy
or to address the image of America. We need a more sustained effort
to build understanding of the principles of free­dom, liberty,
and justice, as well as the institutions that ensure these
principles, that actually form the basis of democracy and economic
freedom.

If I had had the same
discussion with our staff in Iraq, I know we would have had the
same exact kind of response. In our Iraq program recently, we had
most of the major Iraqi political parties with us in Jordan. What
we found in talking to them and in talking to the Iraqi business
community was a huge gulf between the two, and I would submit that
there's a gulf between the entrepreneurial commu­nity and the
political community, that we do indeed need a new instrument that's
going to address ideas.

How do you get people
to understand and adopt ideas for themselves? Institutions may
differ; as the President said in his speech, we're not trying to
impose any set pattern. President Reagan said that in his
Westminster speech as well. But unless you have the basic building
blocks, I'm afraid people will not be able to construct for
themselves their visions of what President Bush's speech means to
them in their country. So I would add that as a way to move forward
on a practical level.

Larry M.
Wortzel:President Bush's second
Inaugural address tied current American policy to the Cold War and
the ideological fight against Com­munism and its particular
form of tyranny, and then the President extended that to all forms
of tyranny. That's a very important appeal. For someone who's
served in the military, and particularly during the Cold War,
President Bush's Inaugural address evokes images of preparedness,
of military strength, of the forward presence of American forces
over­seas, and of catastrophic nuclear attacks on the United
States, and those are still real concerns today.

Most important, and
what I like best about that speech, is that President Bush tied
American vital interests directly to our national values and our
ide­als. I find it very ironic that people who said we're going
to war in Iraq for oil suddenly turned around and criticized
idealism and the spread of democracy. I don't know how you get from
one place to the other.

The President did this
realizing that values like the preservation of liberty, freedom to
speak and to be prosperous, the freedom to associate, and the
freedom to worship as we choose are things that bind us together as
Americans, and they bind America to others around the world who
have those values or who aspire to those liberties.

If you've ever taken an
oath to defend your nation with your own life and your own blood,
and you've actually carried arms in the service of your nation, you
take this Inaugural address pretty seri­ously because it makes
it very clear that Americans are going to fight for freedom and
democracy. To those that carry that fight not only with the courage
of their convictions, but with an automatic rifle in their hands,
it's a serious speech. It raised the morale and pride of the
American military and the American people.

But it seems to have
stirred some sort of fear that the results of this speech would be
repetitive wars and military adventures to impose democracy and to
depose dictators. I think it stirred some fears that our
international relations would degenerate, that America would force
its will, and sons and daugh­ters would die for nothing in
foreign lands.

As you've heard before,
nothing could be further from the truth. The Inaugural address
brought some Americans to think that the results of such a speech
would be these repetitive wars, and I think that many foreigners
were a little more suspicious of the implications of the speech
than Americans. It's very important to realize when you talk about
the Amer­ican military that it's a professional military, but
it's not a mercenary force. American soldiers and sail­ors,
airmen and Marines are quite willing to put their lives on the line
for America's vital interests, but, as Norman said, there are
practical limits to what we can do. So there's going to be a
debate, con­tinually, about what constitutes a vital
interest.

But this speech was not
about the muscular imposition of democracy. I would point to the
eighth paragraph of the speech, which made it very clear that this
is to be done primarily through the export of our values and our
freedoms and not by a force of arms; citizens of nations struggling
toward liberty have to choose that freedom for themselves, and
we'll be more than happy to help and defend ourselves and
them.

The debates at home are
going to be over wheth­er the use of force serves American
interests and what constitutes a vital interest. I'd argue that
today, we face issues like the threats against democ­racy in
Taiwan by the tyranny in the People's Republic of China, the
threats against the democra­cy that the United States nurtured
for years in South Korea by whatever North Korea does. I think that
you can count on the fact that the United States, as a nation, and
its military are going to stand by those democracies.

There are limits to
what our forces can do, and they're stretched. I think the
President clearly real­izes this, and that was the bulk of the
speech, dis­cussing the economic and the political and the
other real ways to build democracy overseas. So I think that he
showed a great deal of courage and insight in that speech, and he
ought to be com­mended for the values that are embedded in
it.

I want to take a minute
to look at our military. I don't know if you've had a chance to get
out and talk to people who are on their way to Iraq in the
military, or who have come back, or who are on their way over for a
second tour. Most of my con­tacts are in the Army and the
Marines, because that's what I did; I spent some time as an
infantry­man in both. They're taking the heaviest toll in the
Army and the Marine Corps, and it's not always in the infantry
anymore. It's supply people and medi­cal people and maintenance
people and artillery­men, who very rarely had to get out and
patrol up front and now are performing infantry tasks.

But when you talk to
people that are coming back, or even the ones on the way over for
their second tour, you don't get any cynicism. That's very
different from the Marine Corps and the Army I served in during the
Vietnam period. You don't get cynicism. People really adopt and
have adopted the ideals that are embedded in that
speech.

Gary Trudeau and the
Doonesbury comic strips do not get it right. The cynicism in
there is not what you see when you talk to American soldiers today.
They feel great about what they've done; they feel good about being
over there; they feel good about going back. They're not happy to
leave families to go back a second time, but they feel good about
going back, and they see that it's accomplishing
something.

So I think it was a
great speech. I think it will live to be a great speech, and it's
one that inspires our military.